you like to head up the Forty? Do us all a favor and be the next president. Von Klappenemner’s term’s up, and it’s time we got a younger guy in there, somebody from the literary end. These composers, they look good presiding, but they have no head for facts, and a few facts come up from time to time, even there.”
The Forty—its number of members a wistful imitation of the French Academy—was one of the innumerable honorary organizations that the years 1865–1914, awash in untaxed dollars, had scattered throughout Manhattan. It was housed in a neoclassical, double-lot brick-front in the East Fifties, near the corner of Third Avenue, where the glass boxes—Citicorp! the Lipstick Building!—were marching north. Anunwed heiress, Lucinda Baines, who, like Pamela Thornbush, fancied herself a patroness of the arts, had left her grand townhouse, with a suitable endowment, to serve as the gracious gathering-place of the hypothetical forty best artists—painters, writers, composers, sculptors—in the country. Her fortune had stemmed from a nineteenth-century nostrum called Baines’ Powders, a fraud taken off the market by the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, but not before its illusory powers of palliation had eased many a rough-hewn death; the powders were gone but the fortune rolled on, keeping the mansion in heat and repair, feeding the faithful at the Forty’s half-dozen ceremonial dinners a year, and funding a clutch of annual awards to the possibly deserving with which the organization preserved its tax-exempt status. A small paid staff fulfilled the daily duties, but by a romantic provision of Lucinda’s will the membership itself owned the building and controlled the endowment. “How come you’re involved?” Bech asked, perhaps rudely.
When Izzy blinked, massive lashless eyelids had to traverse nearly a full hemisphere of yellowing eyeball. “I’m on the board.”
“What about
you
for president? Isaiah the prez: that has a ring to it.”
“You schmo, I
was
president, from ’81 to ’84. Where were you? Try to pay attention—you never come to the dinners.”
“I’m watching my figure. Don’t you find, once you pass sixty-five—”
“Yeah, yeah. Listen, I got to circulate. The wife is giving me the evil eye. But think of Edna—she’d love it. She’s dying for you. I’m asking on behalf of Edna.” Edna was the directress, a wiry little white-haired spinster from Australia.“Don’t make her beg, at her age. The whole board is crazy about the idea. They delegated me, since they thought we were friends.”
“Izzy, we
are
friends. Read your fucking Festschrift.”
“People can be friends. Writers, no. Writers are condemned to hate one another, doesn’t Goethe somewhere say?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter.…
Or was that Schiller? Forget it. I’m putting this forward as a person. Loosen up. Remember the good times we had in Albania? We were the first Western writers in over the top.”
“Slovenia,
not
Albania. Nobody got into Albania. Ljubljana World Writers for Peace, in the Carter years. How could you have forgotten, Izzy—that frisky little blond poet from the Ukraine we had to do everything with in fractured French? Remember how she showed us the trick with a little tomato, biting it after tossing down a shot of vodka?”
It had been Bech, though, and not Thornbush that she had taken back with her to her cell of a room in the people’s hotel. But much of the fervor of the encounter had been wasted in a breathless whispered discussion, in uncertain French, of birth control. She had kept rolling her eyes toward the corners of the room, indicating, as if he didn’t know, that the walls were bugged. He knew but as an American didn’t care. Perhaps she had been risking the gulag for him. How lovely in its childlike skinniness her naked body had been! Her pubic hair much darker than the hair on her head. The acid aftertaste of cherry tomato fighting with the sweetness of vodka in
The Forty—its number of members a wistful imitation of the French Academy—was one of the innumerable honorary organizations that the years 1865–1914, awash in untaxed dollars, had scattered throughout Manhattan. It was housed in a neoclassical, double-lot brick-front in the East Fifties, near the corner of Third Avenue, where the glass boxes—Citicorp! the Lipstick Building!—were marching north. Anunwed heiress, Lucinda Baines, who, like Pamela Thornbush, fancied herself a patroness of the arts, had left her grand townhouse, with a suitable endowment, to serve as the gracious gathering-place of the hypothetical forty best artists—painters, writers, composers, sculptors—in the country. Her fortune had stemmed from a nineteenth-century nostrum called Baines’ Powders, a fraud taken off the market by the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, but not before its illusory powers of palliation had eased many a rough-hewn death; the powders were gone but the fortune rolled on, keeping the mansion in heat and repair, feeding the faithful at the Forty’s half-dozen ceremonial dinners a year, and funding a clutch of annual awards to the possibly deserving with which the organization preserved its tax-exempt status. A small paid staff fulfilled the daily duties, but by a romantic provision of Lucinda’s will the membership itself owned the building and controlled the endowment. “How come you’re involved?” Bech asked, perhaps rudely.
When Izzy blinked, massive lashless eyelids had to traverse nearly a full hemisphere of yellowing eyeball. “I’m on the board.”
“What about
you
for president? Isaiah the prez: that has a ring to it.”
“You schmo, I
was
president, from ’81 to ’84. Where were you? Try to pay attention—you never come to the dinners.”
“I’m watching my figure. Don’t you find, once you pass sixty-five—”
“Yeah, yeah. Listen, I got to circulate. The wife is giving me the evil eye. But think of Edna—she’d love it. She’s dying for you. I’m asking on behalf of Edna.” Edna was the directress, a wiry little white-haired spinster from Australia.“Don’t make her beg, at her age. The whole board is crazy about the idea. They delegated me, since they thought we were friends.”
“Izzy, we
are
friends. Read your fucking Festschrift.”
“People can be friends. Writers, no. Writers are condemned to hate one another, doesn’t Goethe somewhere say?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter.…
Or was that Schiller? Forget it. I’m putting this forward as a person. Loosen up. Remember the good times we had in Albania? We were the first Western writers in over the top.”
“Slovenia,
not
Albania. Nobody got into Albania. Ljubljana World Writers for Peace, in the Carter years. How could you have forgotten, Izzy—that frisky little blond poet from the Ukraine we had to do everything with in fractured French? Remember how she showed us the trick with a little tomato, biting it after tossing down a shot of vodka?”
It had been Bech, though, and not Thornbush that she had taken back with her to her cell of a room in the people’s hotel. But much of the fervor of the encounter had been wasted in a breathless whispered discussion, in uncertain French, of birth control. She had kept rolling her eyes toward the corners of the room, indicating, as if he didn’t know, that the walls were bugged. He knew but as an American didn’t care. Perhaps she had been risking the gulag for him. How lovely in its childlike skinniness her naked body had been! Her pubic hair much darker than the hair on her head. The acid aftertaste of cherry tomato fighting with the sweetness of vodka in
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